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      January 1, 2011Alvin MalpayaLament for the Maker

      I don’t think of good wills and possible worlds
      like I used to, but arm twisted unnaturally or

      gun to my head, I might give it another shot, and
      like it. I can hallucinate with the worst of them,

      conjure a team of demons whose dirty little fingers
      are tied to every object that has ever moved. Or I

      can watch the holy Pollyanna get swallowed
      by a fault line, only to rise again with just a scraped

      knee and elbow. The curse of being conscious is
      all the possibilities—and what a rough way

      to spend a lifetime: a traveling magician in the land
      of magicians. The last trick is to make the magic

      vanish altogether. Saw your girlfriend in half, get
      hauled off to jail, don’t escape, and they might call you

      an original. By then, you won’t care. Ay, there’s
      the shrub, the gushy one on fire whose deep,

      sexy voice can make you melt. And how liberating,
      to realize at last you only felt alone and wretched,

      but never were. Such bombshells are enough to
      make you confuse yourself with the universe, think

      things happen according to painstaking calculations,
      then throw your arms up and scream, Okay! You do

      exist, you bastard, you do, so now what? Carry on,
      I guess, that’s what most of us do, despite an inner voice

      saying make like a tree bleeding in hell and dwell on
      how you can’t leave, a pair of hungry, hungry harpies

      licking your earlobes. The most atrocious part is
      still being alive, or at least conscious of having died.

      The only thing you’d need then is an un-Maker
      to pray to, someone who can make the words in the book,

      if you will, disappear one by one as they are read,
      so that life is truer to life, and the live-forever fantasies

      can last only the length of a subtle sigh that barely passes
      for an exhalation. And, no, not some toe-stepping god

      meant to steal God’s thunder, but a god without glowing carrots
      and ever-growing sticks, for whom the best possible world is

      beyond imagination or one in which imagination itself is
      impossible. Did I just say: Steal. God’s. Thunder? I kill me.

      from #33 - Summer 2010